After applying for an initial DoD secret clearance with a contractor back in Sept 2018, I was notified by my FSO that my clearance was listed as ‘secret clearance eligible’ about 1 week ago (May 8). She noted that it would take a day or two for it to get over to HR, at which point I can finish onboarding and start the job that I have waited 7+ months for.

I obviously have some patience, having waited 230+ days from SF-86 submittal to the call from my FSO that I was eligible. However, it has taken over a week now and this has been the hardest waiting to endure since I know that I really should be done waiting to start.

This seems like a very company-specific phenomenon, but I wanted to check if any one else had found this particular corner of purgatory before me.

Since the clearance process takes so long, I don’t think that most companies have everything sitting and waiting for your approval in JPAS. Big companies take time to move on most items and start dates are just another that takes some time.

In many defense contractors, once you are available to start, HR and others still have to make certain that budgets are in place so that you can start charging your time to a project all the way down to phones lines and laptops being ready.

In my case, after 18 months of waiting, it took another four weeks before I could start because they were in the process of budgeting and wanted to make sure that there was money available where they were going to place me.

But, things like this happened to me several times in my 40 year career of non-cleared jobs.